The 'icicle' people

About Midnight Stories: October is the month of spooks and things that go bump in the night, so what better than a series of scary stories to get you in the mood for Halloween? Have a spine-tingling story to share? Email them at submissions@gmanews.tv. Read on.

Art by Jannielyn Ann Bigtas

Deidre was a most peculiar child. When she was about two or three years old, she had imaginary playmates.

Not so unusual for children at that age to have those but to be able to draw them in such detail? They were a recurring fixture in her drawings - including the ones on the refrigerator door held in place by fruit magnets. Those tiny icicle people—two of them—dancing in the air. Whirling about with smiley faces.

What are these? Her mother would point them out in her artwork and she always gave her the same names: "my friends". 

Her mother would often catch her deep in conversation with these unseen beings at different times of the day but she really didn't think there was anything to it—just child's play.

At the time, Deirdre did not really have anyone to play with in their apartment building; she only had a rascal of an elder brother, Doug, who loved annoying her.

The day the incident happened, Doug the mischief maker started working on her early. From the time they sat down to breakfast till after the dishes had been washed and put away, they were going back and forth like a skipping vinyl record on a turntable:

"Are, too!"

"Am not!"

"Are, too!"

"Am not!"

She left them to it, certain that the quarrel will be over as quickly as it began once Doug finds something else to entertain himself with like worrying the neighbor's cat or shooing the birds from the scraggly excuse of a tree out front.

Suddenly, a wail. And Deirdre shoots out of the dining room and down the hall towards her godmother's unit at the far end. She always ran to her Ninang's place when she needed someone in her corner who could admonish Doug.

But before she could catch the elder boy by the ear as he shot past her and after his sister, he was off with a whoop and a holler—and her "pingot" caught not an ear but empty space.

She sighed audibly, intent on going after the two and referee yet another quarrel when Doug let out a bloodcurdling scream from the hallway.

She ran outside to see what was the matter, thinking her son had injured himself. Instead she saw him standing still in the middle of the corridor, his face transfixed with terror.

"Doug, what happened?!" she gathered her son who was shaking like a leaf in a high wind and hugged him close to her.

His hands were cold and clammy and his face was ashen.

It took the good part of an hour to bring some color back to his cheeks and remove that look of terror from his face. "Ano bang nangyari?" she kept asking him.

Deirdre chose this time to waltz back into the apartment, raising an eyebrow as she passed her kuya.

"Kasi inaaway niya ako, " she nonchalantly told her mother like it was the most natural explanation for the entire episode, "so my friends punished him."

Only while she was tucking him in bed that night would he confide to her what really happened. As he hit the hallway in pursuit of his sister, Doug said something like a cage fell on him from above—effectly impeding his progress and enveloping him in darkness like someone switched off the lights in a room without windows.

The next day, she marched him downstairs to the little old grandmotherly type who conducts pagtatawas where the affliction can be diagnosed by interpreting the form produced in water by molten wax droppings from a lighted candle—this particular lady's technique was done on a heated spoon.

She raised terror-filled eyes to her after she 'read' the wax forms on the spoon. "It's a good thing these two did not connect", she told her pointing to two icicle-looking forms. "Otherwise, your boy would have been lost to you forever."

The punishment had been administered and the lesson imparted.

Doug would never again tease his little sister else he earn the ire of her unseen friends. — LA, GMA News

• The house on the ridge overlooking Taal lake